Reader Reviews

Reviewer:

Moving and generous of spirit, Something Missing richly evokes the worlds and lives of two very different women, chronicling their friendship as it evolves over time. (Sophie Masson, author)

Something Missing narrates the story of a life changing friendship that spans decades and two continents. It is a powerful and beautifully told story of how we grow through the power of friendship – and how relationships change over time. Empathetic, full of life’s truths and wise – Something Missing is a work that stays with you, and speaks to our hearts. (Wendy Dunn, award winning author)

Any woman who has experienced love and loss will identify with the powerful emotions Whitting evokes in this tale of unlikely friendship between two women whose individual lives and unspoken truths allow them to cope with living. (Author Cindy Vallar)

Pickle to Pie is a gut-wrenching story about belonging, identity and the difficulties of breaking the circle that so often binds us to repeat the past. Fredi, a first generation Australian, grows up at the beginning of the 20th century in the Melbourne home of his German grandparents.

Rejected by his own mother because he embodies her shame of becoming pregnant to Fredi’s sailor father before their marriage, shadowing his parentage with doubt, Fredi is given a strong sense of his German identity by his loving grandmother. But this identity proves to be a complicated and fragile web. All his long life, Fredi is not only dislocated from his parents, the country of his birth but also his own wife and
children.

I want to belong to the Australian world of beer, beaches and barbequed chops, but on hot summer nights I still dream my old childish dreams. I’m riding a sled down steep icy slopes, or laughing and falling with other children as we skate on a lake of ice.

Brought up to take pride in his German heritage, a life of alienation and two world wars take its unrelenting toll on a man who strives to be like the Colossus of Rhodes, tall and strong with one foot in either world.

To be a good German. And a good Australian. How can I do it and keep my
balance? Like that huge statue I topple and shatter into a thousand
pieces…

Whitting is an extremely gifted storyteller and wonderful crafter of character and dialogue. Her novel brings back to the stage important periods of Australian history, two World Wars, the terrible Great Depression, when people trampled on one another to ensure their own survival. Slipping further and further away from living memory, these times especially need remembering now.

Pickle to Pie also reminds us of a simpler time. Family life happens in the kitchen, adults and children toil together in the “vege” garden and wisdom passes on from one to the other, the weekly dunny man, newspaper squares for toilet paper, hanging on its nail – a time when there was time to meditate upon nature while sitting in the outside “lavvy.”

Frank is a lovingly wrought character. Not a perfect man by any means, therefore very human, he has innate nobility enabling him to break the circle cursing his family.

Pickle to Pie is a superb addition to our country’s fiction examining the human fabric that makes up the Australian psyche.